What experts are saying about the Bruins’ playoff chances
With 11 minutes left in Game 7, Toronto led Boston 4-1 and looked to be on their way to the second round for the first time in a decade. Seventeen minutes of ice time later, the Maple Leafs were watching Patrice Bergeron celebrate with his Bruins teammates after scoring the overtime winner.
“That hockey game will haunt me until the day I die,” Toronto forward Joffrey Lupul tweeted the day after that 2013 first-round game.
Lupul is still under contract with the Maple Leafs but hasn’t played since a sports hernia surgery two years ago. There are five players from that Game 7 left on Toronto’s roster. Eight Bruins remain from the huddle that celebrated the victory, but their team has seen an influx of new faces as well. When Boston begins its 2018 postseason on Thursday night at the TD Garden, Auston Matthews should prove scarier than any ghosts of games gone by. The Bruins (50 wins, 112 points) went 1-2-1 in four matchups against the Maple Leafs (49 wins, 105 points) during the regular season.
Here’s what experts are saying about the Bruins’ chances in the Stanley Cup playoffs:
Greg Wyshynski, ESPN
Let’s get this out of the way: There are only a few players on the 2017-18 Toronto Maple Leafs who were also members of the 2013 Leafs team that surrendered a 4-1 lead, gave up two goals in 31 seconds and then lost in overtime in Game 7 against the Boston Bruins. Different coach. Different era. For the love of Kessel, sweet Auston Matthews was just 15 at the time. Don’t spatter him with those entrails!
That Leafs team was fortunate to make the playoffs, and the franchise wouldn’t do so again until last season. This Leafs team (49-26-7) is loaded up front, and just trying to make the best of it on the back end. But it’s certainly closer to breaking the drought since 1967 than any Toronto team in recent memory.
Nine of fifteen NHL writers, analysts, and editors picked the Bruins to advance past the Maple Leafs in the first round. Seven of them picked Boston to win the Eastern Conference. Two, Steve Levy and Sachin Chandan, predict Zdeno Chara will lift the Stanley Cup.
Dave Feschuk, The Toronto Star
So it’s Leafs-Bruins, round one. And position by position, let’s rate the matchup. Give Toronto an edge in forward depth, Boston the slight nod on the blue line, and call goaltending a saw-off. And as for coaching – at first glance, it’s Toronto in a landslide. Boston’s Bruce Cassidy, after all, has never won a playoff series as an NHL head coach, losing in the first round with the Capitals in 2003 and the Bruins last season. And Mike Babcock’s record, as the cliche goes, speaks for itself. Or does it?
Babcock, known throughout the game for a smartest-guy-in-the-room assuredness that doesn’t always suggest nimble adaptability, has long styled himself as an unbending professor of hockey’s defence-first school. Whether or not the coach’s philosophies will ever truly maximize a Maple Leafs roster loaded with state-of-the-art offensive talent remains up for debate; the evidence to date suggests probably not. But maybe it ultimately won’t matter. This isn’t football, where coaches rule; this is a talent-driven flow game. There’s clearly some value in Babcock’s teachings on NHL defence, which is far from irrelevant.
What does that mean for Toronto in the first round? I’m still picking Leafs in seven, even though they’re the lower seed as measured by the NHL standings. While Boston sprinted through the regular season, Toronto clearly swaggered. The Leafs, to this eye, are faster and healthier and deeper and more talented. And never mind the ghosts of Toronto’s 2013 Collapse on Causeway Street; the current Leafs have beaten the Bruins seven of eight times going back to last season. This team, in other words, is too good for anyone in a suit screw up. And as an underdog, let’s just say Babcock is due.
Neil Greenberg, Washington Post
The Post’s probabilities, which take into account win rates and Pythagorean winning percentages among other factors, estimate the Bruins have an 11 percent chance to win the Stanley Cup. The Tampa Bay Lightning have the highest chance in the league at 15 percent.
The Bruins boast a solid top line of Brad Marchand, Patrice Bergeron and David Pastrnak, but their defense has been sensational at limiting high quality shots. According to Corsica’s expected goal model, which factors in shot quality factors such as distance, angle and whether the attempt was a rebound, five of Boston’s defenders — Charlie McAvoy, Kevan Miller, Torey Krug, Brandon Carlo and Zdeno Chara — rank among the top 30 blue-liners playing at least 1,000 minutes at even strength for lowest expected goals-against per 60 minutes. McAvoy and Miller have been good enough to rank among the top 10.
The benefit, of course, is Boston’s goaltenders don’t have to deal with as many scoring chances, especially those classified as “high danger” from the slot or the crease. Tuukka Rask sees a league-low 24 scoring chances per 60 minutes at even strength and just 9.5 high-danger chances per 60 minutes, the fifth-lowest among 25 netminders playing at least 2,000 even-strength minutes this season.
Adam Gretz, Pro Hockey Talk
Bruins in five games. This feels like it should be a pretty close series because the teams do seem to be pretty evenly matched in a lot of areas (forwards, goaltending, special teams) but the Bruins are simply a better defensive team and have been the best team in hockey since early November. They keep that rolling in this series. The Maple Leafs did win the season series, but two of those wins came just before the Bruins really started to hit their stride. They are a different team now than they were in the first month.
Steve Buckley, Boston Herald
Help me out with this: How often does a team enter the regular season with no expectations and then enter the playoffs with high expectations? I’m talking about the Bruins here. With all the young, untested players they were planning to sweater-up going into the 2017-18 season, the B’s were nobody’s smart pick to win the Stanley Cup, or to even advance to the conference finals.
And now? Now, some of those young players are emerging stars. Now, they have three players who have scored 30 or more goals in David Pastrnak, Brad Marchand and Patrice Bergeron. Now, they have a coach, Bruce Cassidy, whose place behind the bench no longer is a constant reminder of the necessary but nonetheless clumsy manner in which Claude Julien was fired. And now the expectations have changed. With their 50-20-12 regular-season record, the Bruins are way beyond being plucky underdogs. They are Cup contenders.
Joe Haggerty, NBC Sports Boston
It might feel counterintuitive to say this with the reigning two-time Stanley Cup champion placed near the top of the Eastern Conference seeding for the playoffs, but the East should be wide open this spring. Sure, the Penguins still have Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin and Phil Kessel and Mike Sullivan holding it all together on the Pens bench and this postseason’s road to the Cup will undoubtedly go through Pittsburgh. But it would be a Herculean feat for the Penguins to have another long run in them this spring after Cup runs each of the past two seasons and that should make them vulnerable in the Eastern Conference bracket.
The Bruins were the NHL’s best team for a four-month stretch from mid-November until mid-March and it wouldn’t surprise anybody if that team shows up again in the postseason now that their final 21-games-in-39-days gauntlet has passed.
Bob McKenzie, TSN
I’ve learned over the years to take the season series and throw them out the window they don’t mean a damn thing. The Bruins are a Cup hope, let’s be honest here. They flirted with being the best team in the Eastern Conference. It was between them and Tampa right down to the wire. But the Leafs are a top team too. Both teams have really good goaltenders. I find a little bit that Risk can run hot and cold, maybe a little more so than Anderson although any goalie will tell you this the very nature of the job is that goalies will run hot and cold. I think that the Bruins defense with a rejuvenated Zdeno Chara and Charlie MacAvoy… That’s a real strong blue line. MacAvoy’s an absolute stud for me I always call him the American Drew Doughty I think he can impact the game in so many ways and he elevates his game… When I look at the Bruins up front, that first line of Marchand, Bergeron, and Patsranak, the Leafs have to have an answer for that.
Brandon Schlager, Sporting News
The Bruins are high on everyone’s list of Stanley Cup favorites, and rightly so, but the Leafs aren’t far behind. This Atlantic Division meat grinder isn’t going to be kind to anyone involved. With Patrice Bergeron on Auston Matthews, the Leafs need their other lines to lessen the scoring burden, especially Nazem Kadri, Mitch Marner and Patrick Marleau. The Bruins are deeper on defense, too, and Tuukka Rask gives them a slim edge in net over Frederik Andersen. All that said, Toronto beat Boston three times in the regular season — each without Matthews in the lineup. Matthews took his time recovering from several different injuries this season. He’s well rested now. In fact, there might not be a healthier team in all of the playoffs. Another year wiser, the Leafs have the feel of a team that can get on a run and win a Cup, years ahead of schedule. Maple Leafs in 7 games.
